“But why? but why? That does seem foolish. I have read that the ladies are always helped first. That must be because of their appetites.”
“Insie, I tell you things, not the reasons of them. Things are learned by seeing other people, and not by arguing about them.”
“Then you had better eat your dinner first, and let me sit and watch you. And then I can eat mine by imitation; that is to say, if there is any left.”
“You are one of the oddest people I have ever seen. You go round the corner of all that I say, instead of following properly. When we are married, you will always make me laugh. At one time they kept a boy to make me laugh; but I got tired of him. Now I help you first, although I am myself so hungry. I do it from a lofty feeling, which my aunt Philippa calls 'chivalry.' Ladies talk about it when they want to get the best of us. I have given you all the best part, you see; and I only keep the worst of it for myself.”
If Pet had any hope that his self-denial would promptly be denied to him, he made a great mistake; for the damsel of the gill had a healthy moorland appetite, and did justice to all that was put before her; and presently he began, for the first time in his life, to find pleasure in seeing another person pleased. But the wine she would not even taste, in spite of persuasion and example; the water from the brook was all she drank, and she drank as prettily as a pigeon. Whatever she did was done gracefully and well.
“I am very particular,” he said at last; “but you are fit to dine with anybody. How have you managed to learn it all? You take the best of everything, without a word about it, as gently as great ladies do. I thought that you would want me to eat the nicest pieces; but instead of that, you have left me bones and drumsticks.”
He gave such a melancholy look at these that Insie laughed quite merrily. “I wanted to see you practice chivalry,” she said.
“Well, never mind; I shall know another time. Instead of two birds, I shall order four, and other things in proportion. But now I want to know about your father and your mother. They must be respectable people, to judge by you. What is their proper name, and how much have they got to live upon?”
“More than you—a great deal more than you,” she answered, with such a roguish smile that he forgot his grievances, or began to lose them in the mist of beauty.
“More than me! And they live in such a hole, where only the crows come near them?”